Here are some sentences with 'half of' and plural nouns that I consider to be well-formed: Half of all films are a waste of celluloid. Half of users surveyed said they preferred the old product...
Your premise is faulty. For instance, I speak British English in the accent I grew up using (namely Received Pronunciation), and don't pronounce any of your example words with sd rather than st. This is just one example which shows that the way English words are pronounced varies greatly across the English-speaking world, so you cannot make a generalization like yours that is valid for more ...
Clearly, LA, OC, and SD are part of Southern California, but there are a lot of other places that are located in southern California that are not located in Southern California, such as Palm Springs, Salton Sea, Joshua Tree, Blythe, etc. The other concern I have is that southern is a geographical term, that I feel shouldn't be usurped in this way.
(NY, SD, WV, etc) Take the first two letters of the state name to form the abbreviation. Take the first and last letter of the state name to form the abbreviation. The first two rules are never broken. The second two are broken as needed in order to obey the first one. But which one takes precidence?
Both are grammatical, but the first is more usual. We are all is much more frequent than we all are in both the Corpus of Contemporary American English and in the British National Corpus. There are, however, some contexts where we all are would be used. The answer to the question Who is responsible? might be We all are, and not We are all. That apart, as a non-native speaker, you would be wise ...
